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Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#151

Post by WJW »

vlian2088 wrote: post #89
alehrs wrote: post #50

I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can a…

>Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. because fiat can be taken away from you.

Why do you think stablecoins cannot be taken away? There are already many cases where eg Tether got a court summons and handed over the contents of certain wallets to the local authorities.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#152

Post by cherryteastain »

Agree re. prediction markets and predatory marketing but disagree so hard with this

> The private interest is genuine, a global market's appetite for a frictionless way to hold dollars, captured by the saver who holds the token and the issuer who books the reserves. The cost is paid by everyone outside that transaction. What looks rational for the individual Nigerian saver is corrosive for Nigeria.

The way this is framed by the author is something like "poor $COUNTRY central bank has its citizens best interests at heart but evil stablecoins are tying the poor central bank's hands". The reality could not be farther from truth. In countries mentioned in the article like Argentina, Turkey or Nigeria the governments are incredibly corrupt and they use monetary policy and capital controls to make loads of cheap financing available to the ultra rich while inflating their debts away. The net effect is that in these countries the combination of inflation and currency debasement is used as a direct wealth siphon from the middle/upper middle class to the ultra rich (the poor have no savings and therefore are less affected). As a result the middle and upper middle classes of these countries entirely evaporated in the last 10-15 years.

Stablecoins are not the issue here, the governments are.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#153

Post by PaulHoule »

sfjailbird wrote: post #102
PaulHoule wrote: post #44

The weird thing about it to me is that it lumbers on. There was that time I’d dread going to parties because that crypto guy was there. That time Bloomberg got its best writer to write a whole issue of Businessweek about it a week before the SBF fraud broke. Then there was that weird time between when crypro brown jumped on the AI bandwagon before Ezra Klein did. And now the crypto bros are still talking… to each oth…

> The weird thing about it to me is that it lumbers on. Perhaps it is actually useful to some people.

People who collect ransomware payments?

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#154

Post by ses1984 »

sfmz wrote: post #101
ses1984 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just give your agents a debit card number loaded with only as much money as you specify.

You spin up agents and want them to paid without opening a bank account... or spin-up hundreds of agents... or your country isn't very well integrated with western banking rails. I think there is more to consider.

You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#155

Post by akoboldfrying »

> A defender will say that gold is no different, a price that refers only to itself, and that we do not call gold a fraud; but gold carries a floor of industrial demand and a monetary role thousands of years old, and Bitcoin has neither.

I'm always interested to see how anti-crypto people try to differentiate gold from crypto, and so far I've never seen anything convincing. Gold's industrial utility as a good electrical conductor could not have begun before electricity was discovered, but it was valued just as highly for millennia before that. The "monetary role thousands of years old" claim has no force at all, because it does not even attempt to explain what it is about gold that caused it to acquire this role -- and identifying some relevant property of gold that crypto lacks is a prerequisite of any argument that attempts to differentiate the two.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#156

Post by drptech »

this_user wrote: post #107
himata4113 wrote: post #45

Cryptocurrency is very much a double edged sword, on one hand it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own. Of course this also allows people with harmful intentions to do the same, bypass centralized systems that keep fraud in check, mitigate theft a…

> it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.

[dead]

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#157

Post by jakelazaroff »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #134
jakelazaroff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.

I can’t think of many better examples of social problems than sanitation and public health.

In that case, what are examples of non-social problems you can think of?

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#158

Post by th0raway »

kakacik wrote: post #110
fn-mote wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m ignorant of this but it seems wrong. 30% lost in fees?? Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere? Also: > being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight I for sure put crypto in this same category. “Stablecoin” or not.

Sounds more like social security avoidance, or general taxation avoidance. Which country will take 30% cut from incoming foreign transaction? The highest combined fees I could find are for Sub-Saharan Africa and those are below 10%, supporting tax/social evasion claim. Could be completely legal but when folks don't provide details its often safe to assume the worse scenario when it comes to money, taxation and screwi…

What they are often talking about there is countries where the official exchange rate is very different from a real world exchange rate: This happened in Argentina quite often. That led to special black market stores where people would give you local currency for dollars at better rates, and often also had some crypto support. You are then going past the legal market either way.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#160

Post by mothballed »

ses1984 wrote: post #154
sfmz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spin up agents and want them to paid without opening a bank account... or spin-up hundreds of agents... or your country isn't very well integrated with western banking rails. I think there is more to consider.

You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.

The amount of money you can load or receive into a debit card is limited without doing enough KYC overhead you could have gotten a bank account with the same effort.

If you try automating bots to do KYC for debit cards what you'll be doing is basically looking like a money launderer and get all your accounts shut down.

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